Top E-Commerce Security Threats and Solutions in 2023

11 min read

Not to mention, the E-commerce industry has become profitable for the past few years and it is estimated to reach $4.5 trillion by 2021. Online shopping is now a more convenient option for customers. With all the benefits e-commerce companies are having, there are a lot of obstacles in the way that they have to face. In this article, I will be mentioning some of the major e-commerce security threats and solutions that every e-commerce business should be aware of.

You should not ignore your e-commerce business security because it just not only damages your business but you will also lose your trust in online customers. If your company is not secure enough, the online shopper will not put their money and credit cards at stake. One thing you should remember that is online security has a direct effect on your sales and online reputation.

The success of the e-commerce industry has attracted more cybercriminals to exploit the gaps in online security. Many big online e-commerce companies have realized the need for advanced threat protection and they are making their efforts to keep the hackers away. Learning from leaders in the e-commerce industry, you must adopt the best e-commerce practices to avoid all possible cybersecurity threats to your business.

Read this article till the end to know some major e-commerce threats and some solutions that you can adopt to avoid computer security threats.

Transaction Fraud

Major E-commerce Security Threats

Direct Site Attacks

Although phishing is a passive method, sometimes e-commerce stores can be exposed to direct attacks such as DDoS (dedicated denial of service). Those who want to put your e-commerce store under blockade will program numerous internet-capable devices to use your online store website.

This composed attack will overwhelm the hosting of the e-commerce store and stop the website from loading your regular visitors. It will keep your website busy, so it can’t focus on the visitors that matter to your business. This type of attack can burn via hosting data allowances, causing issues for businesses. The DDoS campaigns are comparatively rare, but not very much that they can’t be a threat. The goal of a DDoS attack depends on the condition. From time to time it will cause trouble to the store and spoil your reputation, as a corporate disruption. Most of the time, a DDoS attack will be attached with blackmail such as sending a certain amount of money disabled to the attack.

Brute Force Attacks

A Brute Force Attack is the simplest method to access a server or website (or anything protected by password). It attempts several username and password combinations repeatedly until it gets into your account. This action is very much like a fort attacked by an army. Brute force attacks target the admin panel of an online store. They do this to guess the password and get into your system, the attack directness makes it brute-force. A brute-force attack in cryptography involves an attacker giving in many passphrases or passwords, hoping to eventually guess the correct password.

After using software to access the website, it uses code-crunching programs for password cracking through every combination possible. To avoid this attack, it is important to protect your system by creating complex and strong passwords, and regularly updating them. This attack is not illegal itself, but it can be used illegally. You should consider any attack on a network that you not getting your permission as illegal.

Transaction Fraud

Transaction Fraud


Every second, an online transaction happens, and customers have now started trusting the technology for money transactions. There are two primary ways of financial fraud. One is stolen credit cards, to get unauthorized payments (with the products purchased kept, or sold, even if payments are canceled). Second is transactions using insecure systems that get redirected or interrupted.

Online shoppers can also have access to systems offering extraordinary financial convenience. You can get bank support via live chat, and cancel payments using apps. But this doesn’t completely defend from this kind of fraud. The motive is simple: most of us will not bother to check our bank records, and it just takes a lapse in attention for a cyber-criminal to make several payments. Online shoppers are now very well understanding the significance of site security markers like the HTTPS indicator.

Such indicators can frequently be deceived in a way that’s appropriately substantial for many people. This forgery type can make it rather complicated to tell when the service of a site is secure. Customers should be educated and be more alert online.

Password Assault

Generating memorable passwords can make your systems extremely susceptible and open to attack. There are two key approaches to these kinds of attacks. One is brute forcing, using a running program that puts different combinations of passwords to eventually get it right. Second, what can be known as informed guessing is when the attacker uses pieces of information from the life of a user, gathered off social media to categorize the words that the user can use in the passwords.

If they identify the main admin password, the resulting access can turn out to be very damaging as it cannot be observed for some time. Important modifications can be made, data can be stolen, your systems can be taken offline, and someone can also transfer the money, all with a slight risk to the person with access. It is very much like getting into someone’s house– there may be no damage apparently, but it occurs when you are at home.

Bots

Bots can be bad and good. Some of them are good at determining how to rank a website on search engines by crawling the Internet. Bots can also jam your websites for inventory data and pricing and change prices on a website, restrict popular shopping carts’ items, and thus damage website revenues and sales.

You can avoid this by protecting mobile apps and exposed APIs, regularly inspecting traffic sources searching for spikes, and then blocking those proxy services and hosting providers.

Social Engineering

Social Engineering


Social engineering is a comprehensive technique for getting access to money, systems, or assets via dishonesty at a social level rather than directly using technology. Phishing is one of the most common types of social engineering that involves pretending that someone is reliable when communicating with someone and misusing that trust forgetting something.

In the near past, phishing usually occurred via letters, phone calls, and also through house visits. A phishing attack example is a calling person and claiming to be from the bank saying they want to approve credit card information. When eCommerce and online shopping developed and became more widespread, it grew more complicated.

Phishing & Spam

Getting false “you must take action” emails, either to your customers or company is a mostly-used trick and kind of deception used by hackers and spammers. It does need follow-through and accidentally offering your personal identification information or login information. The key solution here is to educate customers and train your employees.

Text boxes and contact forms for blog comments are also open to spammers. They can drop infected links that someone can click, ruining site security and your company’s reputation. These are also known as SQL injections; the cyber-criminals want to get access to your databases through query forms. These links silently wait in inboxes for employees and can disturb the speed of the website. You should do proper training of employees and anti-virus software and download spam filtering tools, regularly updating them.

Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) Attacks

A Man-in-the-middle attack is known to occur when someone with malevolent intent enters into a discussion between two parties, imitates both of them and gets information these two parties are sending each other. The exciting feature of this situation is that maybe both parties are not aware of the man-in-the-middle.

If in case a man-in-the-middle situation occurs on your site, the man-in-the-middle can send you an email, that would look genuine. It is also probable that the man-in-the-middle has made a site that looks very similar to the website of your bank, so you would not falter to enter your authorizations and confidential information. There are various kinds of man-in-the-middle attacks, such as DNS spoofing, IP spoofing, stealing browser cookies, SSL hijacking, HTTPS spoofing, and email hijacking.

Malware & Trojan Horses

Malware & Trojan Horses

Various kinds of malware want to enter the backend of your site to steal confidential and private customer information and site data.
Malware uses ransomware, malvertising, SQL injections, cross-site scripting, and targeting personal data and credit card info. Malicious JavaScript coding is one of the most famous. WordPress websites using Woo Commerce frequently targeted by malware injections through plugin upgrades and widgets. You have to use some professional anti-malware and antivirus software, switch to HTTPS, admin panels, and secure servers, and get SSL certificates while employing multi-layer security.

Customers and admins may have downloaded Trojan Horses on systems. It is one of the wickedest network security risks where these programs are used by attackers to swipe private information easily from their systems.

SQL Injections

SQL injections are cyber-attacks planned to get into your database by targeting query submission forms. They insert malevolent code in the database, gather the data, and later on can also delete it. In the SQL injection attack, a third party can use SQL commands to get into the database backend without any permission. This usually happens when websites integrate user-inputted text directly in a SQL query and run this query against their database. SQL injections are notoriously hard to identify. Different from remote code injection, cross-site scripting, and other infections, SQL injections are susceptibilities that do not leave any hints on your server.

Blocking Cart

Anyone who ever shopped online understands the significance of an online cart. However, hackers can block the cart by inserting many products in it via numerous IP addresses. It also pushes the online cart limit and your product will show out of stock to the customers on your online store.

These are known to be malevolent bots whose major target is to stop clients from shopping for products from a specific e-commerce store. Furthermore, these reasons severe harm to the shopper, as they feel frustrated and annoyed with the site and move to a competitor’s store for shopping. As a consequence, you lose a large customer base to the competitors.

Malicious Threats & Poor Management

Another major ecommerce security threat you should be careful about is malicious software. These typically comprise worms, Trojan horses, and viruses. All of them pose a serious hazard to your site and system. Viruses are usually presented in the system via external sources. When they are successful in getting into your network, they can destroy the system from the inside by files corrupting and unsettling the operations of the e-commerce store.

Worms are very different from viruses, as they don’t need a host and can be spread directly from the internet. They are more lethal as compared to viruses as they can infect lots of computers in a matter of hours. Trojan horses are fundamentally programs intended to perform huge destruction. This threat root lies in the file downloaded, henceforth teaching us to always look for where the file downloaded originates.

The main reason why e-commerce stores have to experience internet security threats is insufficient management. Sometimes the management gives priority to other things than e-commerce store security, these kinds of businesses expose their system to security risks.
You have to assign proper funds for regular security checkups or anti-virus software, otherwise, there will be data security threats around the corner, ready to attack your site and systems.

Here Are Some Key Solutions to Avoid the Attacks

Here Are Some Key Solutions to Avoid the Attacks

Active Protection

Your e-commerce store is always under threat and can be attacked anytime, irrespective of its essential security actions, this threat needs more dynamic network security measures, so you have to ensure a DoS protection service. The idea is very simple– incoming store traffic is parsed and monitored, and when requests for the visit are measured to be fake, they are blocked completely. This protection stops the DDoS attack from making your site slow to a crawl or affecting its performance.

PCI DSS Compliance

The PCI DSS standard was set up to dramatically raise online payment security levels. Any business related to eCommerce that wants to make its transactions secure (and boost its reliability in the process) must take some action to meet it. PCI Compliance Solutions is still very common as it should be. It is very annoying, as it must not be a matter for the retailer since basically, it is an advantage. Compliant sellers show up more by removing their sales funnels of harmful dead ends (a major tactic for conversion optimization) and investing to ensure the security of online buyers.

Stronger Passwords

There are two approaches that you can apply to make your password more strong and secure. Primarily, they must use and need more complicated passwords to be internally used. They don’t have to be awkward or long, but they should not be as simple as “abcd” or “1234”.
Furthermore, for admin access, they must start using multi-factor authentication. This arrangement needs the logged-in user to pair their password with one more authentication, such as a verification code sent through text message. It is also worth creating a website backup, in the unpredictable event, that someone has gained unauthorized access to your system and started making sweeping changes, they can rapidly return to previous backups.

Wider Education

As we know, it is very hard to prevent phishing as it is such a wide-ranging category, and it includes no force. It comes down to the hackers laying down the bait and expecting that people will take it. For retailers, the best method to avoid phishing is to teach their buyers about how they function. They must

add instructions to their website and use marketing materials. Online shoppers must know that when they get emails, they know how to recognize them as legit. Customers should know what they have asked for and what will never be requested of them by the company. Retailers should motivate their buyers to reach out for validation if they ever get dubious emails.

Payment Gateway Security

It is just as serious as web hosting, it is significant to ensure that your payment gateway provider is taking security seriously and guarantees all third-party sites linked to yours, put security first.

Secure Your Servers and Admin Panels

Many ecommerce platforms have default passwords that are very easy to track, especially for hackers. So, if you don’t update them regularly, you are revealing yourself to avoidable hacks. You should use complex usernames and password(s) and also try to frequently change them.

You can move further and make your panel inform you whenever an unidentified IP attempts to log in. These are some of the simple steps that can improve the security of your web store.

Switch to HTTPS

If you are using HTTP protocols, it can make you exposed to security attacks. It is highly recommended to switch to HTTPS which shows the trustee green lock says “secured” next to the URL on the clients’ system. HTTPS protocols not just defend the private data users submit, but also the data of their users.

As HTTP protocols are not very secure now, most contemporary browsers show a message alert to the user from further proceeding because the site does not seem secure. Other than that, some browsers also block the user from opening the website. HTTPS will also rank you higher on Google.

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Use Firewalls

The web hosting provider must have a firewall for their servers, but it is also good to have one Firewall specifically dedicated to your website. Numerous security plugins have their built-in firewall, you can use these plugins to improve the security of your server.

Antivirus and Anti-Malware Software

Using viruses and malware, hackers can steal your credit card information and use it to make transactions from anywhere in the world. An anti-fraud or antivirus software can support you with this major threat of ecommerce sites. They use complicated procedures to flag any spiteful transactions that can help to take some timely action. They offer a fraud risk score that can assist managers in identifying if a transaction is valid.

SSL certificates

Secure sockets layer also known as SSL certificates are files that connect a key to transactions on various network paths. These are the certificates associated with your credit card information and transactions to queries. SSL certificates encode information to defend it from unauthorized access between various destinations. Using these certificates, you make sure that the data you are sending will remain safe and secure.

To do an online business, you should have SSL certificates so that every process taking place on your e-commerce website is protected. Also, it offers you an ownership certificate so your site can not be accessed by any hackers as a phishing counterfeit.

Backup Your Data

Data loss because of the cyber-attacks or hardware malfunction is not unusual. And if you don’t regularly back up the data, you are at the risk of losing your data. You must do it yourself and not rely on anyone to do it. You can also get an automatic backup service so if you forget to do the manual backup, all of your data will be automatically backed up.

One thought on

Top E-Commerce Security Threats and Solutions in 2023

  • Hammad Mohsin

    E-commerce security is not something to be taken lightly. Major data leaks have fundamentally damaged trust in digital security.

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